Cannibalism and Socialism

I had never heard of the Asmat tribe of New Guinea until I was reading a mystery novel. Since it was a novel, I thought I'd better check to see if there really was an Asmat tribe. I came across several websites that confirmed their existence. A good one is papuatrekking.com.

The thing that caught my attention was not only the fact that the Asmats used to be cannibals, but that their name means "the human beings." By implication, if they are the human beings, then perhaps others are not. Indeed, according the University World News website, they have a word for other people, manowe, which means "the edible ones." Seems about right for a tribe of cannibals.

In other words, the Asmats defined their "food" as being non-human and, once defined in that way, non-Asmats became manowe or 'edible." I suspect that there were some cannibal tribes who saw their victims as being very human and, in fact, that was the reason some of them were killed and eaten. People who were seen as possessing desirable qualities were eaten in the belief that those qualities could be transferred to the eater as the victim's body was consumed.

There is something intriguing about reducing people to a non-human state in order to move beyond any guilt or taboo issues; intriguing, but not unique. The Asmat tribe was not the only group to practice these mental gymnastics.

During Hitler's reign of terror in the years leading up to and then through World War II, Jews were defined as being less than human and, therefore, subject to whatever indignities that the Nazi rulers could subject them to.

Even before that, however, in the early history of our nation, slaves were defined as being the equivalent of 3/5 of a white person. That may not be the same as being declared totally non-human, but it had the same effect as slaves were often treated as beings who had no feelings or intelligence.

The habit of many pro-choice advocates to define an unborn person as a fetus or lump of tissue removes the sense that the mother-to-be who does not wish to be a mother is dealing with a human being rather than an inconvenient and removable piece of tissue on the level of the apparently useless human appendix.

In politics, the tradition of dealing with groups-underemployed people, or people of color, or the rich-has the effect of removing the focus from real, live human beings and placing it on a group of nameless people who do not have to be treated as individuals. The solution to the group's problems is to throw money at them as a group or to take money away from them as a group (for example, in the form of higher taxes for the rich) without having to deal with how a particular policy may hurt one person or help another person. Treating all people in a group in the same way is the easy way to make policy, but an ineffective way to deal with the underlying problems that plague the world in which we live.

The major flaw in the political system known as socialism is that it treats people as things in big groups. By supporting and encouraging certain industries, it assumes that all people want the items produced by those industries. By throwing big amounts of money into items like universal health care, it assumes that everybody wants that kind of health care and that the expenditures by the government will actually be helpful for the common good. The reason socialism has failed in the past is because it has refused to trust the individual to make appropriate decisions, thinking that government has the skills and insights to make better decisions.

What is incredible is how political leaders can continue policies that have failed miserably in the past and somehow expect the results to be different this time. How do we explain that almost inexplicable situation? One possible answer is that our political leaders have not studied history and have not recognized the failures of socialism in the past. Another possible answer is that they know about the failures, but don't care; they have their agenda and it doesn't matter what the results will be--although these leaders hope their efforts will be recognized as good. A third possible answer is that our leaders are simply incompetent, and there are days when I feel that that is the case.

Just as it was said that the French Revolution of 1789 began to eat its own children, so any government that refuses to deal with its citizens as individuals is well on the way to "eating" them and to do so with the feeling that not only was the "meal" good, but that the "food" enjoyed being eaten.

Sources:

www.papuatrekking.com/Asmat_cannibals.html

www.universityworldnews.com/article.php